According to the BBC, at some point over the weekend, the name of the British Army’s Twitter account was changed to Bapesclan along with a “profile picture depicting a monkey-like cartoon figure wearing clown makeup.” Another site, Web3 Goes Well, reported that the military’s Twitter account details were at one point “changed to look like the Possessed NFT project” and posted tweets promoting a new collection of NFTs linked to a fake mint site. The British Army’s YouTube account has been renamed to look like Catherine D. Wood’s very real investment firm, ARK Invest, and has posted several live streams featuring Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk that were originally broadcast last June as part of an Ark Invest conference . The live streaming videos were modified with overlays promoting several Bitcoin and Ether cryptocurrency scams, which clearly answers the question of why both these social media accounts were hacked. By Sunday afternoon, both accounts, which together have more than half a million followers, had been fully restored, but you can still access archived copies of the hacked versions of the British Army’s YouTube and Twitter pages via its Wayback Machine service Internet Archive. The British military has officially confirmed that the hacks took place, but while it is still investigating the incident, it has not clarified or even speculated on who or what organization might be behind it. An army spokesman told the BBC: “While we have now resolved the matter, the investigation is ongoing and it would not be appropriate to comment further.”
